Prejudiced readers take pride in being a woman

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Pride and Prejudice has been called inspirational - and
irrelevant, writes Hadley Freeman.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the book women
feel has most transformed their lives is the one that has assured
them for the past two centuries that, yes, they will marry the
wealthy, handsome man next door and live happily ever after.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's salty-tongued
commentary on the plight of women in the 19th century, has won the
Women's Watershed Fiction poll, run by Britain's BBC Radio 4.

Despite being about women's lives 200 years ago, the relevance
of Austen's classic has not diminished, according to the 14,000
voters, 93 per cent of whom were women. It is, voters said, the
novel, with "Mr Darcy" as its brooding love interest, that "has
spoken to you on a personal level; it may have changed the way you
look at yourself, or simply made you happy to be a woman".

Second place in the list went to Charlotte Bronte's Jane
Eyre. The other runners-up in the top five were To Kill a
Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Women's Room by Marilyn
French, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

However, solidarity in support of the choices has not been
universal.

The journalist and writer Julie Burchill was particularly
scathing about the chosen top five, her main point of contention
being that "if Jane Austen heard women today talking about
clitorises she'd faint ... I can't see why Pride and
Prejudice would make one feel proud to be a woman. If the
question was, 'Which book makes you proud to wear an empire line
dress?', then I could understand it."

The more overtly feminist choices - "the slash-your-wrist
corner", according to Burchill - were given equally short
shrift.

The writer Suzanne Moore similarly questioned Austen's relevance
to 21st-century women, albeit with slightly less specific and
descriptive objections: "I can't see how it changed women's lives;
it just confirmed what they were meant to be. It is a great book,
but it's about how women have to shape themselves within social
conventions."

However, the author Helen Simpson, whose book Hey Yeah Right
Get a Life, has been acclaimed for its startlingly realistic
depiction of modern motherhood, praised the winning choice:
"Pride and Prejudice is inspiring because the pitch is so
perfect."

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach professed surprise at the final
list: "Where are the young women?"- but said women's continuing
weakness for the happy ending with a wedding wasn't a shock: "There
is still all of this longing in our psychology. We want these
lovely redemptive romantic endings, to be seen and understood, but
within the confines of femininity."

Nevertheless, perhaps the most striking feature of the list is
how all of the authors are white and none of the books was written
later than 1986. "It's not very multicultural, is it?" added
Orbach.

As with any poll, the temptation is to try to draw some
conclusion about today's world.

Simpson said there was one factor that united the top five: "All
of these books feature characters who are in some way second-class
citizens, yet are spirited and uncompromising in their search for
freedom and, in some cases, love as well. They aren't victims, but
they do have to struggle in society."

Burchill questioned the value of any poll about women's
literature: "I think if people had been hooked up to lie detectors
the winner would have been Jackie Collins."